Literally all of it
Public school is the chief apparatus through which capitalist ideology spreads, taking on the role the Church once held in feudal societies. The audience of the public school includes the totality of children born into capitalist societies, for five days a week, eight hours a day, from ages 6 to 18.
Succeeding in test-centered capitalist schools requires little if any critical thought, but rather discipline, memorization (i.e. tolerance for busywork), and, above all, OBEDIENCE. Those that prove themselves most obedient are allowed to join the children of the bourgeoisie in swallowing the more explicit indoctrination of the universities, where they accumulate the necessary ideology (and debt) to insure their status as loyal servants of imperialism.
The rest seamlessly transition into the workforce, having spent virtually their entire lives adapting to the strictly-regimented, unfulfilling, authoritarian paradigm of the capitalist workplace. They learn through homework--an abomination of capitalist development--that their jobs must come home with them, that they must always be at least "on call" for their employers. They learn through inane group projects that collective action is inferior to individual production. They learn through the lionization of MLK and Ghandi that non-violence is the only legitimate form of protest. They learn that America is not an empire, with school maps quietly omitting America's various non-state "territories" (colonies). They learn that Native Americans were primitive hunter-gatherers. They learn that the civil war was about state's rights. They learn to venerate the genocidal "founding fathers." They read fucking Animal Farm.
So anyway, yeah. Fuck school.
Thanks for writing all this so I don't have to. I had one teacher explain to a class that evolution isn't real, so I think that counts.
They learn through inane group projects that collective action is inferior to individual production
Not being from the U.S I'd appreciate if you could extend yourself on that point.
Not OP but often group projects are used by teachers to reduce the # of things to grade and ostensibly give students a reason to "learn teamwork" but the projects are increasingly less suited to being group-orientated with the reduction in school funding and increase of class sizes.
For example, i had to do a frog dissection in biology in school, but this was for some reason a group project. Now i don't know if you've seen the size of a frog, but it's really just a 1-person job. And only one set of tools per group. So basically you just have projects where it's 1 person doing all the work and then one person to write it down, then 2-3 others just kinda. Doing nothing. there's a whole subset of memes around group projects.
There's also group papers assigned frequently, which are a fucking nightmare to write. "each person just writes a section" but why? you all have to learn the same material and it's going to make for a less cohesive paper. In the end, it always leads to one person being forced into a leadership role they don't want (the teachers don't pick groups based on who would be a good group or leader, or even say who WILL be the leader) and taking on the slack from people who recognize that it's bullshit make-work that won't teach them anything and exists soley to give the teacher some easy grading days.
Oh yeah also the topics are either assigned (boring) or the groups decide themselves, which, as all of us know, leads to a bunch of fighting and then 3/4 group being disinterested in the outcome outside of their grade. So no one enjoys them, they don't teach you how to work together or actually complete anything interesting unless you get SUPER lucky with the assignment/group.
Grew up in Alabama. Was regularly given detention, written up, or straight up insulted by teachers and threatened by students for not standing during the pledge. This around 6th-7th grade during the Bush years.
One school I went to had a "moment of prayer" every morning where before home room they gave you like 5 minutes to pray or whatever. I used it to play with my tech decks hell yeah. This was a public school way out in the sticks in a town with a population of 1,200. Other kids used to make fun of me for being a "city boy" even though the town I moved there from only had 30,000 people.
Uh, lots of American exceptionalism. For like 2 months straight, right after 9/11 and the Afghanistan/Iraq invasion, most of our classes were just the teacher bringing out a TV and turning on the news to watch live coverage of the war. No curriculum, no teaching, just watching American imperialism distilled through talking heads on whatever news channel had the best drone footage of "combatants" being bombed from 12,000 ft.
Imperialism as taught to me: "Well, it's a shame all that, uh, bad stuff happened, but ya know, you've gotta break a few eggs!"
Yeah and it's treated as unfortunate things that happened in the past, instead of very real current US foreign policy.
If the only knowledge I had about WWII was what I learned going to school in Denmark in the 1990's I would think that the war could be summarised in the following
- The Nazis started the war because they were evil and hated Jews
- Then they occupied Denmark
- For five years you couldn't buy coffee
- The Danish resistance was very brave though and everyone supported them.
- The British helped them out a bit
- Americans were also the good guys
- Then the Nazis lost and Hitler shot himself
Nothing about the eastern front, the Pacific or even western Europe. Nothing about collaborators although more Danes fought for the Nazis than for the allies. Most certainly not a single word about communists being the backbone of the resistance. Nothing at all about the social and political background for the rise of Nazism. Nothing about Nazi ideology apart from being evil and hating Jews. All we learned were the glossy nationalist version of what happened in Denmark. I don't recall them even talking about the Holocaust as more than a side note.
Certainly the lack of any detail of what happened after WWII could count as right wing propaganda, if we consider not teaching it makes it seem less important.
That and Latin American history are basically totally ignored for this reason. How many Americans know that the US used the Marshall plan to bar communists from government in Italy and France despite the fact that they had even greater popular support than in most eastern european countries? How many Americans know about Allende or the Contras or literally any aspect of imperialism in Latin America?
My elementary school used a program to teach 3rd-6th graders 'entrepreneurship'. I can't remember what it was called (Junior something?), but it was all about the power of innovation, the free market, and bootstraps.
On the Civil War, we were taught a 50/50 split between slavery and states' rights as causes.
Animal Farm and 1984 were taught as being pro-capitalism, anti-socialism books. Harrison Bergeron was taught as being unironically what 'equality' is about.
Harrison Bergeron was taught as being unironically what ‘equality’ is about.
this reputation going around kept me from reading Vonnegut, I was told it was a polemic against equality
the closest we got to criticising churchill was "he wasn't a good man, but he was a great man, and what the country needed during the war"
which is fucked up on so many levels
"of course the people he thought were subhuman and tried to starve to death think he's bad! they're so biased! don't they know we wouldn't have been able to fight the nazis without his... speeches?"
those people are beyond hope
The weirdest one I remember is how muddled up my high school American History textbook was about the annexation of Hawaii, like it literally painted the US invasion and occupation as an intervention to stop the coup, instead of being part of the coup plan itself. Then there was the civics class that unironically taught that progressive taxation schemes "punish success" and basically was unironically just the meme of chuds not understanding how tax brackets work.
Most of the propaganda about history came more with a sort... sanitizing and glossing over things. Like the genocide of native americans was talked about, even including a few specific atrocities, but always in the most detached and disinterested language and with that insufferable liberal overtone of "yeah it was bad then but we've all moved past it and there's no issue now" that suffocates discourse about past American atrocities. The coverage of the civil rights movement was just the pEaCeFuL pRoTeSt WoN tHe DaY shit with only sparing mentions of reactionary violence. No mention of the mass deportation of 2 million hispanic americans in the 50s, no coverage of any war past WWII in class, with everything becoming sparser and information-light as it got closer to the present.
Perhaps the strangest part was just how much of the portrayal of government policy was sticking to ideas of the old Keynesian consensus, like it was so detached from the idea of ideology that there's just The US Government and it does things like "workers rights" and "regulation" and that's why it's "good." It's honestly no wonder how so many liberals grew up not understanding how neoliberalism replaced keynesianism, when they're taught vapid shit like "socialism is when the government does stuff, communism is when a does a lot, freedom is when it does just enough and not a hair more."
which yielded a Wiki page with literally a list of massacres.
I just looked it up because I was curious to see what you came across. Here's the link in case anyone else wants to see too. It's sometimes said here not to trust wikipedia, specifically on leftist issues (and I agree), but this is a surprisingly illuminating list.
100%. People had to die for those rights in actual battles like Blair Mountain. Instead we pretend that Henry Ford, a literal fucking Nazi who helped the Germans during the war, "invented" labor rights. I wonder if the Jews in his factories had the same labor rights.
I'm sure this is far from the most egregious rightwing, anti-communist propaganda, but in like 7th grade (1990s), we read the Vonnegut short story Harrison Bergeron. I'm still not sure if the short story itself is explicitly red-scarey. It may well be, but I'd have to read it again as an adult to judge it fairly.
Either way, it was very much taught as a cautionary tale about the evils of communism and the kind of dystopia socialist ideas would inevitably lead to. We were basically being told that any society that attempts to treat people fairly is destined to become a totalitarian hellworld where all freedom of expression is stifled and any kind of unique beauty is destroyed so that ugliness can be the norm.
I remember at the time thinking it was pure bullshit, even feeling like what they were trying to teach us there was a weird contradiction when they also talked about equity being a good thing. Of course I had no idea how to express this or what they were trying to achieve by drilling in this strange slippery-slope argument, but I did feel like something was really "off" at the time.
Edit: Yeah, most of what we were taught in school was anti-communist propaganda. I mean, have you seen American grade school history books? It's fucking blatant. But I mention the above because it really stood out to me even at the time as something that was being pushed on us, something that was totally counter to the kinds of ideals I held even as a dumb kid with extremely naive politics.
I like Vonnegut too. Honestly, the way it is in my memory is that the story was a Ray Bradbury work, which would make perfect sense if it were rightwing propaganda bullshit. But of course it's not Bradbury. I'm going to have to read it again, but is Harrison Bergeron as bad and cringey as I remember it?
Oh man this just reminded me, we had to read Anthem in English class. What a stinker, and this was before I was even a leftist. At least it was only Anthem and not something longer
I was fooled into thinking that Reagan and 1800s robber barons were good and that the Vietnam war was justified, and I was told later on about how under communism there would be no incentive to do any work
